Red Rooms director Pascal Plante on empathy, digital horror and why we’re all way too online

Every generation has voiced the fear that technology desensitises us to real violence, but the social media age may have triggered a more mundane desensitisation we might all fall victim to. The number of stories, perspectives and desires we consume in truncated doses every day is so huge that our empathy responses start to switch off altogether when scrolling through the faces calling for our attention. We stop thinking the people in our phones are as real as we are. 

When this impulse combines with the current cultural craze of true crime, the relative safety from a dangerous world that a screen provides can lead us astray. Amateur detectives, spurred on by whatever echo chamber they inhabit, who want to feel involved or righteous, can treat real tragedy and injustice with the same enthusiasm as a TV show. Thanks to the internet, there are fewer obstacles than ever to accessing images of violence and crime – and we are more determined than ever to make sense of them ourselves.

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It’s a precarious psychological situation for anyone, but Pascal Plante, the Quebecois director behind tech thriller Red Rooms, finds it exciting. “I don’t want to sound older than I am, going on a rant against technology, because technology is amazing,” says Plante. “It’s human progress, of course, but it also allows for the darkest part of the human psyche to just erupt.”

Plante’s chilling and entrancing film blends courtroom drama, true crime culture and digital horror to confront the perils of being too online. “We’ve just had the opening ceremony of the Olympics, and people are nuts, giving death threats to the people involved in the drag show. I don’t know, how is our empathy doing, guys? That’s the key question that prompted the whole thing.”

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Red Rooms tells the story of an unusual online sleuth: Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy) is a model and blackhat (read: criminal) hacker who’s obsessed with the Montreal trial of Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe Lokos), who live-streamed his crimes for anonymous bidders on the dark web. But the prosecution can’t convict him without definitive proof that it’s Chevalier in the video recordings, so – without ever explaining why she’s so fixated on his case – Kelly-Anne delves into the internet’s backrooms to ensure justice is done.

“I wrote the film in 2021 during the pandemic, in the midst of that isolation listening to black metal and watching true crime, so that’s kind of an explosive cocktail,” explains Plante. “But I was wondering, how is my empathy [affected] by watching so many moving images? To the point where they all blur together; real faces don’t seem real any more.” 

Something in Kelly-Anne’s past, or brain, or computer has wedged a distance between her and everyone else, except Chevalier, who she zeroes in on like a hawk so she can drag him into the light.

But Kelly-Anne’s mission is thrown off balance by Clementine (Laurie Babin), a Chevalier “groupie” (“I don’t really like that word, but for lack of a better term,” notes Plante) who has no doubt that the defendant is innocent. Gariépy’s Terminator-like coldness is countered with Babin’s effusive, babbling conviction; if Clementine feels more human than Kelly-Anne, that also means she can be more misguided.

“There have been Clementines in every day and age,” explains Plante. “She’s very transparent and classical. They’re both ends of the spectrum: Kelly-Anne is attracted by that danger, and the other end are people in total denial. There are gonna be people watching the Magnotta video [Montreal murderer Luka Magnotta uploaded videos of his crimes to the internet, as detailed in the Netflix docuseries Don’t F**k With Cats] like, ‘Oh, this is VFX or there’s somebody behind the camera dictating what he has to do.’ Denial goes a long way.”

Red Rooms is a suspense ride you can’t look away from, a perfect result for a film that makes you want to prise yourself away from screens. But to achieve this, Plante set himself some healthy boundaries. “In researching the film, I did not want to see any [horrific] images at all. To this day, which is almost a miracle, I’ve never seen a human being dying on screen. I tiptoed around it a lot.

“What it did [was] conjure up images in my head. I would listen to podcasts, for instance, I would go on YouTube – there’s this whole subgenre ‘creepypasta’, people just telling you a creepy story. My research got me into very dark places, just stimulating my brain.” 

It’s this stimulation that makes Red Rooms the most urgent thriller of the year – all built on the idea that we’re not just looking at our screen, but that it might be looking back, trying to change us too.

Red Rooms is in cinemas from 6 September. 

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